Intelligence on machines that act
Section
Long-form reporting, market intelligence, interviews and technology explainers — the depth behind the headlines.
On 29 October the FCC votes to let drones use 50 MHz of the 800 MHz cellular band. The carriers want it, the drone makers want it, and nobody objected. The interesting questions are why it took until now, and who still gets left out.
One measures the world; the other infers it. A decade-long fight over how machines should see has quietly ended in a truce — and the terms of that truce explain most of what's on the roof of a robotaxi.
Driver-optional farm machines are working fields at Level 4 today, years ahead of urban robotaxis. The reason isn't better technology — it's a fundamentally easier problem, and understanding why explains the whole sector.
Kraken Technology's uncrewed surface vessels are heading to the Royal Marines, US Special Operations and — via a Rheinmetall joint venture — the German line. The company's rise is a case study in how maritime autonomy became NATO's fastest-moving procurement story.
While robotaxis fight regulators and humanoids ship in dozens, the least glamorous corner of the sector quietly crossed the line that matters — a million Amazon robots, a billion DHL picks, and a fleet-management layer that has become the real battleground.
Three announcements in roughly 24 hours — DoorDash's Part 135 certificate, Walmart's Florida return and Flytrex's multi-modal play — mark the moment US drone delivery stopped being a pilot programme and started being logistics.
XTEND AI Robotics will list on Nasdaq via a reverse merger with a Florida construction company. The deal says less about one firm's prospects than about what defence autonomy is being paid for in 2026 — an American flag on the factory.
Qualcomm, Microsoft, Magic Leap, and now Agility Robotics — the executive running the West's most-deployed humanoid company has built a career on unfashionable patience. As Digit heads for the public markets, her bet is that reliability beats backflips.
As the World Robot Conference opens in Beijing, the quieter contest is over who supplies the reducers, bearings and eyes inside every machine on the floor — and whether the West's component incumbents can hold a position domestic challengers are swarming.
Every autonomous fleet on the road today has people in the loop. Understanding the spectrum from remote advice to remote driving — and why the industry blurs it — is essential to reading any operator's safety claims.
Europe's most active delivery-drone operator halted flights in the country that built it — not over airspace or safety, but a noise assessment and a council planning refusal. Meanwhile a quieter British operation kept flying. The lesson is about permission, not propulsion.
The least glamorous autonomy — the camera watching a production line — is having its AI moment. Edge processors, example-trained models and a shift from "detect the defect" to "judge the part" are quietly rewriting factory economics.
A robot dog running 70% of the rounds at an oil-sands site. An ROV that stays down for a month. Autonomy in energy isn't chasing headlines — it's removing humans from height, depth and hazardous atmospheres, and the economics are unusually honest.
He won the DARPA challenge, built what became Waymo, then left to bet that the future of autonomy was freight, not taxis. Two decades in, Aurora's driverless trucks are running — and Urmson's long game is finally being marked.
Four years of fire-department incident logs say the industry's most persistent failure mode was never rare. Now the regulator agrees — and the data the companies won't publish is being written for them, one 911 call at a time.
Zero-shot inspection models are replacing hand-tuned vision pipelines that took decades to build. Here's what changes, what doesn't, and what to ask your vendor.
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